Menu

Mutual Assured Destruction

Good morning, y’all. Dawn broke again on this old body, so I figured I might as well get over myself and force the effort to rejoin the living. To say that I’m not in as good a shape as I once was, is an understatement of monumental proportions. Heck, I’m not even in as good a shape as I was last year, and that is truly the worrisome part. I mean, how long can you keep eating half as much, and exercising more, to maintain what the medical professionals are calling my “target BMI”. BMI stands for Body Mass Index, which is an acronym to use instead of, “you’re the perfect weight for someone seven feet tall, the problem is, you’re five feet ten inches tall.” According to my BMI, I’m 7’4″.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for improving everyone’s health. Even if it’s the insurance companies driving the bus. Insurance companies fixed the tobacco problem in the United States. Now they’re going after the fat people. I suspect at some point they’ll target alcohol abuse, since they’ll get a twofer, cancer and car accidents. Maybe, eventually, the insurance companies will go after the gun manufacturers. I’d love to see it, but I don’t think the numbers support the effort, from the point of view of the insurance companies. There were 52,000 shooting incidents in the U.S. in 2014, with 12,576 resulting in death. This is just a blip on the radar of the insurance companies. Even if 628 of the deaths were children.

The publication “Cancer Facts and Statistics”, predicted in 2015, “there will be an estimated 1,658,370 new cancer cases diagnosed and 589,430 cancer deaths in the US.” See my point? Even if the gun companies weren’t protected from civil suits by our government, the amount of potential liability from gun deaths pales by comparison to the amount of money spent on cancer treatment. Using a bit of twisted logic, that only I can employ, it is actually beneficial to the insurance companies if folks in the inner cities shoot each other, rather than die from the traditional causes of heart disease or cancer. Particularly now that we have the Affordable Healthcare Act. Twisted, I know, but these are the big players that are in it for the long game. They have actuaries that can give you a death toll, down to the last gnat, for every area of the world. Why wouldn’t they use that knowledge to their own benefit?

Speaking of twisted logic, how about the news that North Korea has set off a hydrogen bomb? I think the “hydrogen” declaration is being disputed, but apparently they did set off something big. As I understand it, the hydrogen bomb takes a level of expertise that is relegated to a handful of countries. North Korea has not been a member of the club. Considering that the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, must have some serious compensation issues, it benefits the world, and the insurance companies to limit his reach.

There was a time, before Ted Turner starting buying up all of Russia’s nukes, that the world was set to go into a nuclear “throw down” at a moment’s notice. The “insurance policy” that was in place to keep both sides in check was called “Mutual Assured Destruction”. “MAD” is the perfect acronym for two super powers slinging thousands of nuclear bombs at one another because one or the other of the leaders “looked at me funny”. To launch a missile attack that would surely bring about the end of the world is indeed, mad. So far, we’ve dodged the “bullet” and neither the Russians or the United States has gone mad. Let’s hope we can give Kim Jong-un the newest version of Ms. PacMan, prerelease, or whatever it is he wants, to keep his hands in his pockets and his finger off the button.

Feel free to Google or follow links on Wikipedia if you want to depress yourself further. It just depresses the heck out of me that we spend so much wealth and intellect on the destruction of life. Makes me want to eat a Twinkie. I hear from the movies, they’ll survive everything.